Falling In Love Again

As Elvis said during his so-called Comeback Special in 1968 (the mother of all unplugged shows), "It's been a long time, baby!"

The wait, that is.

For my iPad.

Heck, I even wrote about it back in early February. I knew then that the iPad would be something special, so waiting four months to actually get hold of one (or even to see one in real life) has been quite a challenge.

Well, the waiting came to an end yesterday afternoon, one day before the official release of the iPad here in Spain and in several other lucky countries around the world. I had already received an email from Apple, to let me know that the iPad, which I had ordered as soon as that was possible from Apple Spain, would be delivered this week. Yesterday morning, a delivery company phoned me to say that they would deliver a package from Apple between three and six o'clock that afternoon (that's a pretty small time scale here in Spain). Finally, at about four, the van stopped in front of our drive and the delivery chappy announced that he had two packages for me. I had also ordered the special Apple iPad Cover, so that was no surprise. Things started to get hairy when delivery chappy kept on searching in the van and scratching his head.

There was only one package!

Fortunately, it was the good one, the one with the iPad, and a quick call to Apple Spain confirmed that the iPad Case would be delivered either the next day (today) or on Monday. No problem there—who needs a case when they've just received a new iPad to set up and play with?

Incidentally, photos of this momentous event can be seen in this specially commissioned Picasa album (photos by She Who Must Be Obeyed).

And how is the iPad?

Need you ask? It is wonderful, gorgeous, beautiful, easy to set up, easy to use. Emailing is so easy; surfing is so easy; reading ebooks (I've tried with epubs and PDFs) is easy, displaying photos is a dream, watching video is a cinch…

The virtual keyboard is a lot better than I thought it would be and the iPad reacts to alignment changes quickly and smoothly, so that moving from portrait orientation to landscape poses no problem at all.

I still say the geeks are wrong (actually, I think a lot have changed their opinion since February). They need to look at what the iPad is and not what they think a computer should be. Two different things and I love the iPad the way it is.

Oh, and the Apple iPad Case arrived this afternoon and is equally gorgeous and perfect for the purpose for which it was designed.